30 Jours de nuit 2 : Jours sombres

The original film surprised me as it was much better than I thought it would be - cheesy in places but the Vampires themselves were quite disturbing and by far the best I had seen for a few years in any Vampire film. Unfortunately, in this follow up they lose all of the menace they had first time around, they don't even speak in their 'native' tongue and it becomes an all too familiar standard modern day Vamp flick. The characters don't endear themselves at all, the acting isn't great and the special effects are OK at best. It's a shame as they had the chance to make another film that was a little different from the standard rubbish around today...True Blood, Twilight etc but they failed pretty miserably. It's watchable I suppose but you'll feel slightly let down at the end of it all.

this sequel follows an original that featured a decent budget and some very good actors.

and this, the first sequel, follows the pattern of most. that is as you move farther from the original, the budget shrinks.

and the consequences are: less sets, less location shoots, less action, no helicopter or overhead shots, cheaper actors, cheaper scripts and cheaper directors.

now some directors can take less money and turn out comparable or even better efforts than the original--but these are few and far between.

and this movie definitely suffers from sequelitis.

the whole thing feels stretched.

Unlike the original, which relied on a tense, cunning, isolated, claustrophobic atmosphere which threw me back to that feeling of hopelessness conveyed in John Carpenter's The Thing, this shoot 'em up sequel focuses more on strobe lighting, gun play, and pop out scares to convey it's tone. The acting is on par with a STV sequel, but I won't even begin to touch upon the scripts many weaknesses. The many shaky cam shots running down dark corridors could have been lifted out of The Blair Witch Project. The trigger happy heroine in this sequel could have been lifted straight from the Resident Evil franchise. All-in-all not a bad vampire movie on it's own, but not a great one either. Worth a rent in the genre for you could do much worse, but if you are a fan of the original and expecting more of the same ... well, drop all expectations and wipe your brain blank once you press play.

So I wasn't what you would call, a huge fan for the first 30 Days of Night movie. I hadn't read the graphic novel, but I heard the movie was a fairly accurate adaptation of it. I did enjoy it, but I felt the pacing was slow, the characters weren't very well acted or flushed out, and really for a movie...devoid of any extensive plot. It was a slow, but occasionally fun watch.

Dark Days, the straight to DVD sequel of 30DON, delivers a lot of the same, only with a smaller budget. The basic plot is as follows: Stella Oleson, one of the few survivors of the first movie (albeit played by a different actress), is out for revenge on all vampires for the death of her beloved husband Eben. She makes her way to a major city, where she holds what are essentially vampire awareness seminars as a way to draw out the occasional one or two inquisitive vampires. This catches the attention of a small pod of vampire hunters, who contact her for their crusade against the uber vampire...Lilith.

The plot really isn't too shabby, but feels very under worked in this film. The lead females' (except for Lilith who has maybe a total of 5-7 minutes screen time) have a pretty believable performance, the lead males are...eh...well they're there at least.

The special effects for a straight to DVD are actually really well done in this film, it's somewhere in between expensive made for TV movies and terrible Hollywood films that should never have made it to the big screen. Cgi isn't hokey, make-up design for the most part is pretty well done. Although the teeth prosthetic look well...well they're kind of like those fake vampire teeth you pick up in the 99c bin during Holloween. Some of the gruesome death scenes and graphic gore is done quite nicely though.

The reason I didn't really care for this movie is the pacing is just terrible. The plot doesn't have enough material to fill up an entire movie, so we get these long dull sequences that just feel like filler. The action isn't too bad, but all of it is filmed in darkness illuminated by flickering lights. The scenery is almost entirely a warehouse district, and tunnel scenes...which can easily BE shot in a warehouse, so your eyes will get bored with the sets. This combined with the sub-par acting by many individuals in this film...just made this film so very...meh.

Basically it was interesting enough that I was able to sit and finish watching it, but it's a completely forgettable film for anyone who's not a die-hard 30 DON fan. It's a fairly bland vampire action flick, personally if I were to watch it with company I'm fairly certain everyone would be too bored to finish it.

After the destruction and rebuilding of Barrow, Alaska, Stella Oleson (Kiele Sanchez) misses her beloved husband Eben and spends her time giving lectures uncovering the truth about the incident in Barrow and the existence of vampires to the world, following the lead of the unknown Dane. In Los Angeles, Stella uses ultraviolet lights in the auditorium to expose the vampires to the audience but the FBI Agent Norris (Troy Ruptash) tells that the incident was a hoax. When Stella returns to the motel where she is lodged, she meets Paul (Rhys Coiro), Todd (Harold Perrineau) and Amber (Diora Baird) that are vampire hunters and leans that Agent Norris is a wannabe vampire and the vampire leader Lilith (Mia Kirshner) is in the city and ready to return to Alaska. Further, she finds that Dane (Ben Cotton) is a vampire that has kept humanity after his transformation and wants to destroy Lilith. Stella joins the quartet that is armed and ready to battle against the evil vampires.

"30 Days of Night: Dark Days" is an implausible sequel of 2007 "30 Days of Night". The incoherent screenplay has many flaws and poorly explains why the group fights with the vampires in suicidal attacks, either on the pitch black of the underground of Los Angeles or in a ship during the night. In the first film, the strength and the speed of the vampires were absurd and now the human can be protected behind a steel door. Kiele Sanchez performs Stella Oleson that was originally performed by Melissa George, and the scene of her final fight with Lilith is a rip-off of "The Descent". The conclusion is ridiculous and with the only intention of giving another sequel. My vote is five.

Title (Brazil): "30 Dias de Noite 2" ("30 Days of Night 2")